


where the fruit grows

by cheloniidae



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, The Divide (Fallout)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28296357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: The Old World speaks of California as a place of beginnings. Ulysses only finds an end.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	where the fruit grows

**vii.**

When you wake, your ribs are inside your chest again, and your hair is long enough to braid.

That’s what you reach for: a cold comfort from a broken history. This room below the earth is sterile and quiet, and in the dim light of an Old World infirmary you knot the Divide's death into your hair. Never started braids on yourself before— on sisters and brothers, on cousins, not you. Takes your fingers a few moments to remember the trick of it. Too many dead would be shamed by that.

You weave the same knot you wove into your father’s braids when fever took your youngest brother, long before Vulpes, and keep going until you run out of length. Can’t fit the full truth of it yet, the hundred-five souls vaporized or burned or buried. You’ve been unconscious for— a month, you’d say. Two months since you found the Divide; one since you saw the earth break, swallow it whole like the Bull swallowed your tribe.

Makes two peoples lost to you.

A machine drifts towards you, a blue arc of electricity in the corner of your eye, and makes a soft chirp like a curious hound. Feels like moving a mountain, turning your head to look at it. Last thing you saw before you blacked out was a pack of machines like this. Enough of them to save more than you, but every bed other than yours is empty, as untouched now as they were five years ago as they were fifty years ago.

“Why me?” Your voice rasps like stone against stone; a cough catches you off guard, burning your lungs and throat until your eyes water.

The machine comes close enough that instinct makes you reach for a weapon that isn’t there, and its light falls on your duster, folded neatly near the foot of your bed. That Old World symbol: bleeding stars in a sea of blue. The machines repaired it just as they repaired you.

The flag is the why of it. America reached out one hand to break the Divide, the other to save you from the ashes. Thinks you are _of_ it. These machines— sleepwalking fragments of a slumbering nation. Ignorant of the Great War, the soldiers struck down, the cities laid to irradiated ruin. Ignorant that you never wanted to outlast a second home.

**i.**

Where do you first hear his name? Could be at a bar, from a merchant, inside an Express office. No more memorable than the first drop of rain in a storm. Doesn’t matter what it starts as; matters what it turns into. (Rain breathes life into the desert and sweeps devastation through the canyons. Death in its nature as much as life. You should know better.)

Haven’t met him yet, but you know him like you’d know your reflection in the Colorado. The two of you walk roads no other courier will. He is of the West but cannot stay there, cannot stay still, no more satisfied with what he finds in the Bear than you are with the Bull. No home on either bank of the river. Every road you walk, you look for his long-vanished footsteps; in every Express office, you read his name on the list.

In Primm, his name is crossed out. “Levitt turned it down,” Nash explains when you ask. “Said he’d rather take a job going to the Divide. Told him this was better money, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“The Divide.” Name sits heavy on your tongue. You've heard rumors of it, this new artery between the Bear’s heartland and its extremities in the Nevada frontier. 

“A bunch of fools with no sense got the bright idea to settle in some pass on Highway 127, right on the edge of Death Valley,” Nash says, mistaking your contemplation for ignorance. “Them folks must have a whole lot of luck on their side. They even have a school; Levitt bought some books for it while he was here.”

Have your standing orders, don’t you? Bleed the Two-Headed Bear until nation and army both wither and die. Other words: cut the throat of the Divide.

But it isn’t Caesar's word that drives you to the Divide. Isn’t duty. It’s him.

**viii.**

Your body is a stubborn thing, but so are you, in your scorched-earth hollowed-out way. Didn’t ask to be saved, didn’t ask America to stitch you back together, didn’t ask your heart to keep beating. Drink, your body says, and you pay it no heed. You’re a son of the desert, the vast and rolling Sonoran — a name you learned from books, not the name you grew up calling it — and thirst is no stranger to you. Easier to lie here. Keep your mind empty of lost homes and bodies left to rot under rubble.

A machine comes again. Can’t tell if it’s the same one; if there are any differences between them, they’re too small to tell. It chirps, and light washes over you, sweeping from head to toe and back again. You feel— you don’t know what you feel. Vulnerable. Seen. It’s inspecting you with something other than eyes, and it can’t like what it finds, because it chirps again, low and displeased. The machines must have fed you, watered you, while you slept. If you don’t do it yourself, they’ll do it for you.

Isn’t love of life that makes you rise and stagger to the sink. It’s stubborn pride. Only twenty steps, but you have to pause twice, bracing yourself against an empty bed until your knees stop shaking and the burning in your legs subsides. A month since the ground broke; a month since you took a step. Only here because you chose to stay in one place, ignored the unwalked miles itching at your feet. Irony’s sharp.

The machine watches you in silence, makes no attempt to interfere. Doesn’t douse your hate for it. Lessens it, a bit.

Eventually, you make it to the sink. You cup your hands under the faucet to drink, and the tang of iron sparks panic against the rough edge of memory. Wasting water is a sin with few equals, but you can’t stop yourself from spitting out the blood-taste. You grip the edges of the sink until your fingers ache, and you remember, slowly, that your chest is closed. You aren’t lying at the bottom of a crater, blood pooling in the back of your throat.

You force yourself to drink one mouthful of water, and another, and another. A machine scolds you for stopping. It should know better. Dangerous to drink too much when you’re this dehydrated, something every child learns before their first scouting—

Learned.

Harder to think in past tense, with new braids tugging at your scalp.

You wash your face when you’re done drinking. No dust comes off, no ash, no debris. Something else the machines took care of. Washed the Divide’s ruin off of you, left you clean and not-quite-whole. Feels like part of a lung was carved out, something the machines couldn’t salvage from the ruins of you. (You’ll learn, later, that you’re right.)

Food comes next: centuries-old military rations, taken from a supply cabinet. Your stomach is unused to solid food; you chew slowly — even the muscles in your jaw have weakened — and you taste nothing. No pleasure in it. Only the thought of the machines feeding you like an infant makes you force the meal down. Last of the Twisted Hairs; last of the Divide. Your pride is for more than just you.

One more weight on your shoulders. One more history to carry. Owe it to them to see the wreckage, before you join them.

**ii.**

The Bear guards the road, the caravans, its precious artery from West to East. Its soldiers wear their allegiance on their chests: that Old World symbol, twisted into something at war with itself. If they had a single mind, a single vision, they might see the frumentarius in their midst— but they grant you passage, suspecting nothing. As Caesar told you years ago: the Bear’s destruction is inevitable. No future under that banner.

But the Bear’s is not the only flag you find.

History breathes in the Divide. Everywhere you look, the flag on your back meets your gaze.

Old World speaks of California as a place of beginnings. Open fields like a waiting mother’s arms, trees laden with fruit for the taking. Leave the burdens of the East at the border: drought and famine, dust and history. Start over in the golden land where the fruit grows. You’ve traveled the West enough to see the lie in the siren song; came here for its end, not your beginning. And yet — here, now, standing on California soil — you pause.

The Divide has no orchards to welcome you, no green and berry-flowered fields, but it has a people. Poor earth can’t stop Dividers from putting down roots, tending paltry rows of paltry greenhouses under the watchful gaze of Old Glory. Strong to survive in this unforgiving stretch of desert; stronger still to have been raked by the Bear but not yet swallowed. Not New California, but a new California.

You watch the Divide. Think of beginnings. Think: maybe the Old World was right.

(Your world shifts here, a change no less than that which the warheads will soon bring. The East is lost to you between one heartbeat and the next.)

**ix.**

(There is an empty space in this history that belongs to the dead. Won’t disturb them now. They earned their rest in blood and fire, and their bones aren’t yours to tell. Let the ashes settle, the bodies return to the earth, the broken houses rot. Nothing behind this door you need reminding of. Some things a man can’t stop seeing.

Back to the living, if you can call them that.)

There are creatures — not men — in the fresh wound in the earth that was nearly your home. Skin flayed by the wind, red muscle exposed to the sky, no less broken than the ground itself. Even when you don’t see them, you hear them howling. Name them Marked Men for how the Divide has carved them, but they aren’t yours to claim. _He_ broke the Divide. They, and all the death in this place, belong to him.

Think, at first, they might be survivors of the Divide itself— but when you get close enough to look, their tattered uniforms kill hope and fear in one stroke. Bear and Bull, bound together by pain and a hell that hates them more than they hate each other. You were the only Legion here when the earth broke. Caesar’s been sending more men into this pit, into the storms and invisible fires. Looking for answers he’ll never find.

You avoid the Marked Men when you can, and when you can’t—

Footsteps behind you, fast, rhythm and weight of a man with a blade. A sound you know canyon-deep. Your muscles may be weaker than they were, but your reflexes aren’t. Wouldn’t be alive if you didn’t know how to disarm an opponent, take his weapon for yourself.

This is the fear that drives your blade into the Marked Man’s throat: if you fall here, the machines will bring you back.

You spend the minutes after the fight doubled over coughing, your lungs punishing you for the exertion, for the dust you breathe in when you gasp for air. Need to find something to filter it. Can feel the invisible fires burning you from the inside already.

Blood glistens on the metal. Easier to see, now, that it’s an imitation of Lanius’ weapon. Original cut the throats of Painted Rock, put fear of Caesar into Colorado and Oklahoma. You’ve seen it at work, though most don’t survive to tell. Blade only confirms what you already knew: the Marked Man was of the Bull, clinging to Legion symbols even with his flesh and mind stripped away. Because of it, maybe. An existence like that needs an anchor. You know how it is, having lost yours.

But you’re philosophizing around the point, a point that cuts like the blade in your hands: You killed one of your brothers.

They are your brothers, still.

There’s a place you need to go.

**iii.**

Legion thinks they’ll get into the community through you, and they have the right of it.

“We’re always pleased to get new folks,” Daya says, leading you to an empty house. Her voice betrays her as walking west from New Mexico; the way people move out of her path betrays her as their leader. Not the way of the East, following a woman. Maybe something of the East that was.

The people welcome you in their ways. Most faces are lost to you in fire, ash, and time— but some memories survive. A pair of Ciphers help fix the wiring in your new home, until the lights glow without flickering; a man of the West tells you the schedule for working the common greenhouses; an old ghoul comes offering drink, which you refuse, and stories of the Old World, which you never can.

“Denver was a shitshow,” Maggie rasps. “We got called in to keep the peace,” and she makes a sound that would be snorting, if she had a nose, “but there was never gonna be any of that. You make people stand in line for eight hours, then tell ‘em you ran out of food for the day? All the soldiers and cyberdogs in the world ain’t gonna stop them from rioting.”

“Seen Denver hounds tear men apart,” you say. “Never seen a crowd they couldn’t handle.”

Another not-snort. “You kids don’t understand what a crowd means. I’m talking five-hundred-thousand pissed-off Coloradans, and all we ever did was make ‘em angrier. I got tired of shooting at civilians who just wanted some damn food, and that’s when I got locked up. Prisons were so crowded they started having to use schools. I still remember where they sent me, ‘cause it was named after our own coward governor. Baines High.”

You remember that building: the barbed wire, the faded name painted above the reinforced doors. A group of Hangdogs tried to barricade themselves in there. Didn’t work. “School’s still standing,” you say.

“I’ll be fucked. Have to remember to burn it down before I lose too many fingers.” She looks you over, reassessing you. “Sounds like you’ve been all over.”

“I’m a courier.”

“All right,” she says, drawing out the words. “Courier. We’ll go with that.”

**x.**

History puts the world in order: this happened, then this. Pins down the past with dates and figures until its bloodied jaws loosen. Says: I-40 was strewn with crosses, and that is past. Says: the Divide died in nuclear fire, and that is past.

But the Divide is always happening.

It happens when your lungs catch on desert dust, and coughing makes you bend double. Your own body’s lesson: you are not whole. You are something resurrected by the Old World, and this desert — the saguaro, the yucca trees, the sun-baked earth — no longer accepts you as its own. The coughing makes you thirsty. Didn’t bring enough water, and that wasn’t by accident.

It happens when you find shelter from a rad-storm in an empty vault, and you spend the night staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the collapse. Think you see your ribs gleaming in the walled-off dark. Better to fill up your thoughts with someone else’s history, you decide. You trace terminal entries through the first floor, but when your feet reach the stairs, screaming instinct binds them. Can’t go deeper into the earth, so soon after it swallowed you.

It happens when you learn of the Bear’s victory at Hoover Dam, and you ask yourself: What if you’d broken the Divide first?

It happens when you pause outside Cottonwood Cove, a hand on your knife, ready to shear your braids. No tribal markings, says Caesar. The only tribe in the Bull is the Bull. Any memory of past divisions is a rot that must be cut out, strung up as an example. Day you left Flagstaff, there was a man tied to a cross in the heart of the city, among the teeming market stalls and the slaves bartering on their masters’ behalves. He’d redone the coyote tattoo that Graham scalded off of him. Didn’t hide his crime well enough.

When you saw him, he was past screaming, his own weight crushing his lungs. His bloodshot eyes followed you every moment. Wasn’t asking to be let down. Was asking for the only mercy left to him.

You kept walking then, and you keep walking now. Leave your blade sheathed, the loss woven in your braids untouched. The Divide happens and happens; Dry Wells has been happening longer. No stop to either of them. If Caesar strikes you down—

Then that’s two histories put to rest.

**iv.**

“D’you know when Mister Isaac’s coming back?” asks a small voice from somewhere around your knee. Mariana. Heard her footsteps behind you as she approached the wind-farm, but thought she was here for Ignacio. No child of the Divide has reason to speak to you. The surprise of being addressed makes you clip a wire too short.

“Marianita,” Ignacio scolds, before you can answer. “Didn’t your mama tell you not to interrupt people when they’re working?”

“But David says Arlene says Maggie says he’s a courier, too! And Mister Isaac’s been gone for so,” and Mariana drags out the syllable for several seconds, “long.”

“He’ll be back when he’s back. Run along, now.”

“But—“

“Are you done with the lessons he left for you?”

“No,” Mariana mumbles, guiltily toeing the dusty ground.

“Do you want to be done by the time he’s back?”

“Mhm.”

“Then go do your schoolwork, and let the adults repair this generator. Isaac will be very proud of you.”

Mariana scampers off. The pair of you work in silence for a handful of minutes, until Ignacio asks, “ _Do_ you know him? Isaac Levitt?”

“By reputation.” It’s as much truth as you’re willing to give.

“Our Isaac has a reputation,” says Ignacio, gleefully. “Oh, I have to hear about this. Did he make somebody cry at poker? Don’t tell me— he gave one courier the ‘caravan isn’t a real game because the players don’t start off equal’ speech, and now everybody knows to never challenge him to a match.”

“None of those. Walks roads other couriers won’t. Divide, for one.” And, unable to stop yourself: “Caravan?”

“His vault — this is what I heard from Daya, so go interrogate her if you don’t believe me — his vault settled everything with gambling. Who got to be in charge, who got to have kids, all of it. The idea was that it made everyone equal. So, a card game where people start with different cards…”

“Obscene to him,” you say, and Ignacio nods. “Didn’t take him for a vault-dweller.” You thought he was like you, raised under the open sky. Couldn’t imagine him being anything else. But he was raised underground, surrounded by metal, the sun nothing more than an ancestor’s ancestor’s story. The Courier's birthplace sounds like a special kind of hell to you.

(Only one kind of thing gets born in Hell, but even now, you don't see the truth in front of you.)

“I thought couriers would have a better grapevine. He’s a vaultie, but only half as smug as that makes him sound. Doesn’t like to talk about it much. Daya could tell you more than I could. From what I’ve gathered, he was a teacher there— that’s why he set up the school here. He’s been surface-side for three years. Him and his husband settled in Shady Sands for a little while, but...” Ignacio spreads his hands. “Whatever happened, it was bad enough to make Isaac start couriering. Hard thing, losing a home. Some things never get put right.”

“I know it.” You do.

“I think the only ones here who don’t know it are the kids. Hope to God they never learn. I’m from Two Sun, myself.” You know what happened in Two Sun, because you were part of what happened to it. Town went down fighting. Took a week for you to stop smelling like smoke. Ignacio is a decade your junior at the least— must have been a child, then.

“West of Vegas,” you lie, answering the unspoken question. “Pushed out by House and the Families.”

“You and Isaac have something in common. House took his vault. I was with him at Lang’s when an ad for the Vault 21 Hotel came on the radio, and he walked out like,” and Ignacio snaps his fingers, “that.”

“Can’t blame him,” you say. (Can blame him for everything to come, but not that.) “Never thought to meet a vault-dweller who could walk the Mojave.”

“Stick around a few more weeks, and you will.” Ignacio looks at you. “Are you sticking around?”

“Not my nature to stay put.”

“You don’t have to stay put. You just have to come back.”

“Like he does.”

“You’ve been a hell of a help here, but God knows we could use another courier. He’d appreciate somebody sharing the load.”

You have a dream that night, one you’ll try to forget but won’t quite manage. The Courier stands before you— the two of you alone in the desert, the Divide behind him, buildings rising out of the earth like mountains. He plucks his heart from his chest, and his heart is a peeled California orange, and he holds it out to you. “Welcome home,” he says, in the voice of a nation. His heart glistens in his palm like a drop of sunset.

**xi.**

Lord Caesar puts the torch to New Canaan, and you make the White Legs into the flame. Graham’s punishment for surviving his punishment. Not death— watching his people die. Death would be kinder, and Caesar is not kind with failure.

Your actions are Caesar’s, but the words belong to Vulpes. Honey-thick lies roll easy off your tongue, like reciting your own history. Same lies turned the Twisted Hairs against Arizona. Children’s laughter drifts over the high walls of New Canaan, and you wonder if you heard Ignacio laugh before Two Sun burned.

What happens in New Canaan: you kill one people, and you damn another.

You wait outside the walls while the White Legs do Caesar’s work. Your work, too, in more ways than one. If you broke the Divide sooner, cut the Bear’s second supply line, Graham could have succeeded. New Canaan would still die, as must all who refuse to bend a knee to Caesar— but in two years, five, not tonight. The ghosts you’ve made breathe down your neck.

They aren’t the last ghosts you face before the sun rises. New Canaan’s ashes are still warm when the White Legs bring you to their campfire, show you their braids. Think their mockery, their defilement, honors you. The ghosts of your tribe dance in the fire’s light, nonsense braids unreadable as pages of a book in a nightmare, and the weight of all your histories bears down on you.

Next night, moonlight shows figures creeping across the distant horizon. Five of them, two larger than the others. Survivors of New Canaan, and you must not allow survivors.

You say nothing.

**v.**

You tell yourself you’re waiting for a chance to act. Bear’s weight sits heavy on this fledgling nation— too heavy for one courier to lift. Need to watch, learn, find a weakness where the artery can be slit. You are a frumentarius, chosen by Caesar as his eyes and ears and hands. You tell yourself your delaying has its purpose in following him.

(You could never fool anyone better than yourself.)

**xii.**

Years later, and you aren’t dead— not by Caesar’s hand, not by your own, and not for lack of trying. Death dogs your heels, but it won’t bite. You’ve lived long enough to ask questions of Old World gods, to let your hair grow until it can hold the full truth of the Divide in its knots and braids and gleaming beads. But not long enough to forget _him_. Could be as old as the canyon Caesar cast his Legate into, and the Courier would still be ash in your lungs.

Spent years looking for the man who ended the Divide. Now your search is at its end, too.

You find Wolfhorn Ranch abandoned, falling apart, in a land caught between East and West. Bear sinks its claws into one flank; Bull gores the other. Can’t say which caught the last owner, or if one is the reason for the grave by the barren flagpole. No name— someone else’s history, buried and forgotten. Not yours to dig through. Their only role in this story is to nourish the grass you’ve claimed as your own.

You string bridges between the hills, dig the well deeper, give yourself to this little plot of land that will never be more than it is. No nation here, only brahmin and bighorners and bridges rocking side to side in the wind.

The flagpole stands empty.

Your feet can’t stay still, even now. When the miles start to tug at you, you find yourself on the path to the nearest Express office. Nash doesn’t recognize you. Haven’t been back here in the four years since the Divide’s name first caught you, dragged you to a nation that would die in fire. (Old World had a saying about those who don’t learn from history, but here you are.) And when the job’s done, the ranch is waiting for you. You’re not at peace, but for a while, you find something close.

**vi.**

Your feet are heavy with unwalked miles, the day the Courier brings death to the Divide. You aren't meant to stay still for long, but you wait and watch and wait. More watching, at the moment. Dividers don’t trust the Bear to keep eyes on the road, but they do trust one of their own.

(You call the Divide an almost-home, a could-have-been-home, because the truth of it would bury you.)

He emerges from the road sand-whipped, sweating, eyes shielded by dark glasses and mouth covered by a kerchief to keep out the dust. First time seeing him, but you would know him anywhere. Your eyes aren’t on the road anymore, and you watch him stop to ask the soldiers where their Major is. Has a package to deliver, he tells them, all the way from the California coast. A place called Navarro.

A soldier signs for the package, and this is when you see it: the machinery, the markings. The package is from the West, but looks like a splinter of America coming home. A sleeping nation being reborn in the Divide, with the Courier bringing it to life. He nods at you as he walks past, courier recognizing courier. You see the future, now, running as sure as the Colorado: the two of you will drive out the Bear, and your nation will breathe, and its flag will fly. A home for both of you.

It’s the last you see of him before the earth breaks.

**xiii.**

You think he’s dead, when you walk into the Mojave Express office. Nash has a job waiting for you: a platinum poker chip, stamped with the same sigil as the sealed bunker at Caesar’s camp across the river. Legion tried opening it, failed, and you think that’s for the best. The bunker’s another piece of the Old World, buried and sleeping. It’ll rend the world like a dream when it wakes.

If a messenger wakes it. Nash has a list of them in front of him, ready to replace you. You skim it by habit, making note of the other frumentarii, knowing you won’t see—

Him. Reading his name is like breathing the air of the Divide. The room feels too small suddenly, like being buried under ruins, like history coming to claim its due. Takes a moment for your breath to come back to you. “Is this name real?”

“Levitt? Right as lack of rain, he’s still kicking.”

“Give him the job,” you say, and put the chip down. It reeks of Old World death, and that death is _his_ burden. Belongs to him. Nash tries to talk you out of it, but you don’t hear it, can’t hear it over the echoes of the Divide breaking open. “Let Courier Six carry it,” you say.

You don’t say his name. Names are for men, women, nations, homes. The Courier is none of that. He’s a message, a lesson. And now— your message to him.

**vi.**

You follow him east on the road, into a rising sun and a rising nation. All frumentarii know how to remain unseen, and you don’t want him seeing you yet. The Divide— that’s where you’ll speak to him. Where the two of you will throw off the weight of the Bear and let his nation, your nation, breathe as it should.

The package he carries is painted with symbols that nearly match those of the Divide. He examines it, sometimes, tracing the E in the center of the circle of stars. You think he’s thinking of home as he does it.

You know how this goes by now, don’t you? The Divide is a story with only one ending. He will hand over the machine, and you will follow the soldiers as they bring it to a silo, and you will watch the machine speak the words to break a nation.

**vi.**

Which memory speaks true? Which is the lie?

Who are you, who do not know your history?

**xiv.**

You’re back at Wolfhorn— repairing the generator, trying to ground yourself back into the patterns of the life you carved here. The brahmin low in the distance; the windmill you built creaks in the breeze. This is as much a home to you as anything can be, which means it’s no home at all, but there is a life. A life without Caesar’s hounds; without the rot of the West; without the chilling breath of Old World ghosts. All you need do is stay. Let the Bull and Bear pass you by. Isn’t that what you’ve done since you left the Big Empty and its answers behind?

No need for you to track the Courier any longer. The Chip will be the death of him, weigh him down enough for the desert to catch up. Death is easy to find in the Mojave: it’s in the blazing sun and the dry earth and the bones scattered across the sand. All it needs is a chance, and he’ll get what he’s owed, what he owes you. An ending.

(No stopping what happens next. He is the loose thread in the fabric of you: one tug and it all falls apart.)

“A package courier found shot in the head near Goodsprings has made a full recovery,” says the voice of Vegas, and the wire in your hand bends until it breaks.

**Author's Note:**

> > Maybe we can start again, in the new rich land—in California, where the fruit grows. We’ll start over.
>> 
>> But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me—why, we’re all that’s been.
> 
> \- John Steinbeck, _The Grapes of Wrath_


End file.
